In April of 1860, on her 17th birthday, Anne's father gave her Wexford, a 15,000-acre cotton and tobacco plantation. He also gave her a new body servant, whom Anne named Moragan. Moragan is not a conventional slave. She is about 10, Irish, and has a habit of speaking her mind - a trait that annoys Anne profoundly! Moragan, does not know the rules and conventions of being a slave - much less being a body servant, so Anne trains her. It is not an easy task for either one of them, and Moragan is certain her behind will be completely worn away before she learns to behave! As America begins to fall apart at the seams, Anne and Moragan begin to forge a completely different relationship. Moragan runs Wexford House for Anne, and she learns what it means to be a slave from both perspectives: owner and owned. Anne always reminds Moragan that she and all the other servants are only stock, and not 'people'. Both of them are products of their time: and as Anne learns how to govern the society under her, she and Moragan discover who they truly are.

“In order to get through your work in proper time, you should make it your chief study to rise early in the morning; for an hour before the family rises is worth more to you than two after they are up.” These are Robert Roberts’s first words to his readers in this classic resource for those employed as domestic servants. More household-management manual than cookbook, the book does contain recipes for making beer and punch, salad sauce, mustard, currant jam, syrups, and fruit-flavored waters of all kinds. There are directions for carving, marketing, choosing meats, fish and poultry, and preserving, and how to complete household chores successfully, clean everything in the house, behave properly, and prepare and serve food for family dinners and parties of all sizes. The book has suggestions for employers on how to manage domestic help (very unusual for the time), but Roberts was more interested in teaching young black men how to succeed in their work and ensure their advancement. This edition of The House Servant’s Directory was reproduced by permission from the volume in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1812 by Isaiah Thomas, a Revolutionary War patriot and successful printer and publisher, the society is a research library documenting the lives of Americans from the colonial era through 1876. The society collects, preserves, and makes available as complete a record as possible of the printed materials from the early American experience. The cookbook collection comprises approximately 1,100 volumes.

First published in 1827 and the standard for household management for decades afterward, The House Servant's Directory is one of the first books written by an African American and issued by a commercial press. It was written while Roberts (ca. 1780-1827) was in the employ of Christopher Gore (1758-1827), a former senator from Massachusetts (and ancestor of the novelist Gore Vidal). Gore Place, where Roberts worked from 1825 to 1827, is one of the grandest neoclassical mansions in America.